


The Light of Day

by prepare4trouble



Series: Little By Little [30]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Connections through the Force, Ezra needs a hug, Gen, Nobody Gets a Hug, Sabine needs a hug, The Force, Visually Impaired Ezra Bridger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-08 05:21:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11074896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prepare4trouble/pseuds/prepare4trouble
Summary: Ezra has a talent for connections.  That isn't always a good thing, especially when other people are hurting.





	The Light of Day

There was… something. Something wrong.

Ezra woke with great reluctance as the comfortable dream that had surrounded him dissipated, leaving him with nothing but the feeling of his bunk underneath him, the brightness of the lights shining through his closed eyelids, and an emotion that was not his own.

It could have been his, it was certainly familiar to him in that way, but it came from elsewhere, somewhere outside of him. It was deep and heavy, made up of pain and grief, sorrow, frustration, and guilt. It pressed heavily on his mind, chasing away any chance of sleep.

He hadn’t felt something like that since the days after Malachor, but this wasn’t coming from Kanan. The source was familiar to him, but wasn’t someone that he had ever connected to in quite this way before. The emotion came in waves, washing over him violently before retreating, only to build again.

Without opening his eyes -- to do so would mean giving up on sleep entirely -- he turned so that he faced away from the door, then wrapped his arms around his head as though he could physically block the feeling from getting through.

It didn’t work. But then, he hadn’t expected it to. It had never worked before. This was far from the first time that he had been woken in this way, he had experience with it; experience that didn’t help in the slightest.

Even as he desperately tried to block it out, he felt himself probing, curious as to the source of the onslaught of emotion. He knew Kanan’s mind, and to a lesser extent he knew Zeb’s. This was neither of them. It couldn’t have been Zeb anyway, he was peacefully snoring in the bunk below him. That didn’t _just_ leave Hera and Sabine, because on the base there were any number of people he could have tuned in to, but proximity made the ability stronger, and that meant that people aboard the Ghost were much more likely culprits than anybody else on the base.

He probed deeper, feeling the shape of the emotions pressing on him, sensing the Force-signature attached to them. He recognized it, but then he would if it was somebody he knew. He concentrated further, not reaching in deeper, but exploring what he already had. Slowly, an image of sorts began to form, and he knew the source of the emotions.

Sabine. 

The instant he knew that, as though responding to his realization, the emotions crested once again. She was a ball of pain. A glowing orb of emotional torment so bright, and so loud, that he couldn’t even begin to block it out.

Ezra had a talent for connections. Or, so Kanan had told him. Once, when Kanan said that, it had felt like a compliment, like a positive thing. At times like this, it felt more like a curse.

In fact, it had never really even felt like a talent to Ezra. Compared to many of the other Force abilities that Kanan had taught him over the past few years, the skill had actually felt like more of a struggle to acquire. He had to admit that he had improved at it quickly, but it still didn’t feel like anything special, it was just... a thing that he could do.

Anyway, to be honest, a lot of the time it was more of a hindrance than a help.

Kanan barely brought it up anymore, not in lessons anyway. It was as though he thought there wasn’t anything else that he would be able to teach him. He even asked Ezra for help when it came to a situation that required that particular skill, and although in a way that felt good, in another he couldn’t help but feel that it was a mistake, that he was nowhere near as good as Kanan thought.

If he was, he’d be better at blocking. Surely that was the other side of the same skill, you couldn’t have one without the other. Or you shouldn’t, anyway, because that was where the problems started.

The emotional onslaught swelled again. Below him, Zeb continued to snore gently, oblivious.

It always happened at night. He supposed that it made sense, it was at night, when people were alone with their thoughts, that things felt their worst. It had been that way after his parents had been taken; the days filled with the endless quest for food and shelter, with forging alliances with others in a similar situation, befriending local street vendors and stealing from those that wouldn’t give him the time of day. It had been when the sun went down and he found himself huddled alone in whatever corner he had managed to find, when he had had nothing to do but think, that his treacherous mind had taken him to places that he didn’t want to visit.

Often, it hadn’t been until the light of day chased away the shadows and the sun had returned, that he had begun to see the problem in a new light and, for those few hours at least, he had been able to convince himself that it would be alright.

Of course, things always felt less hopeless in the light, and he didn’t know what that would mean for him in the coming years. He had to believe that there would be other ways of chasing the shadows from his mind. What he had seen, heard, and felt of Kanan’s experience told him that it would take a long time to find.

Sabine didn’t have that problem of course. She would never have to worry about that -- he _hoped_ she would never have to worry about that -- not for herself, anyway. Apparently, she worried for Ezra though. There was little doubt in his mind that he was responsible for her pain. He had to wonder though, why now? Why tonight? Nothing, as far as he knew, had happened to Sabine over the course of the day that would make her feel it so deeply.

Him, on the other hand, it would have made perfect sense for Ezra to be up, worrying, going over the events of the evening in his mind, unable to sleep. But Sabine? It wasn’t like anybody would have told her what had happened after he connected with the dokma.

Except… what if she had seen it? It hadn’t really been as dark as it had appeared to him. He hadn’t thought there was anybody around, but what if he had been wrong?

No. He would have known. Kanan would have known. Kanan would have told him. He _hoped_ Kanan would have told him. It wasn’t that. It might not even be anything. Perhaps the feelings had been there all along, ever since he had told her, unnoticed by him. He had, after all, opened himself up to the Force that evening, Kanan had told him that what he had done with the dokma had been almost like meditation. Perhaps that was the cause.

In a way, he hoped it was. At least it would mean that he had achieved something, even if it wasn’t the something that he had intended. He was under no illusions that the whole ‘connecting to the dokma’ thing had been anything more than an excuse to get him out of his room, but for a moment there, he had felt as though he was doing something right.

Well, until it had all gone hideously wrong.

But putting that aside, and putting aside the possibility that being open to the Force had allowed things to get in through gaps that he had opened and couldn’t close, he had done something good, and he was still feeling the dubious benefits of it.

The problem with having a talent for making connections was that once he had learned how to do it, it had become tough _not_ to do it. Not always, not even often, but _sometimes_ , it took genuine effort not to connect, or to break a connection once he had made it. And that was fine when it was loth-cats, or purrgil. Under most normal circumstances it would even be fine with the dokma. The times that it became a problem were the times when he realized he was connecting with _people_.

Those kinds of connections didn’t work in quite the same way as with the other creatures; like what was happening now, they were usually on an emotional level; feeling what they were feeling, experiencing their emotional state. It was confusing, and more times than not, it hurt.

This wasn’t the first time it had happened. It wasn’t something he usually did consciously; there had been times when he reached out deliberately to learn a person’s emotional state, but those times were few and far between. Most times, it wasn’t until after a connection had been made, that he realized what he was doing. 

Even that was okay, most of the time. On an average day, and when people were feeling a normal range of emotions. It didn’t hurt anybody, and for a time it had helped him to understand his new family better. But then there had been those times that he had woken from Zeb’s nightmares of the massacre on Lasan, and found himself curled in his bunk, unable to move, crushed by the horror of it.

He should have known then that it needed to stop. He should have spoken to Kanan about it, worked on learning to block it before anything worse happened. But that pain had been private, and he had known it wasn’t his to discuss.

But then Kanan had been hurt, and although it had been the physical pain of his injury that kept Kanan up at night, it was the emotional pain, the same one that, by then, he had already known lurked in his own future, that haunted Ezra, and all of a sudden he just wanted the ability gone.

The Force didn’t work like that though. Or at least, if it did, Kanan had never shown him that part. His training had all been about strengthening his abilities, not learning how not to suppress them. And so he had worked in private on blocking, trying to forge a shield between himself and the rest of the crew. Sometimes, it even worked.

Other times, it didn’t.

Lying on his bunk, Ezra gasped as another wave of sorrow washed over him, and for a moment it was difficult to differentiate between what belonged to Sabine, and to himself. Hands clenched into fists, eyes squeezed tightly closed, he tried to put up his defenses, build a wall to protect him. It did little good.

The worst part was that this was his fault. He had done this to her. To everybody, really. It hadn’t been intentional, but he had done it nonetheless, and the news appeared to have hit Sabine harder that he had realized.

It made a kind of sense when he thought about it. For Kanan, the loss of one’s vision was something he understood intimately, and with that understanding came the knowledge that, for him at least, it hadn’t been the end of the world. Hera too, she had been there with Kanan through the worst of it, and watched him come out the other side. Ezra supposed that he should take comfort from that too, but it wasn’t as easy as that.

Zeb cared. That fact hadn’t _exactly_ come as a surprise to him; over the years, their uneasy alliance had turned to a close friendship, and they did care about each other. Still, it had actually surprised him how _much_ Zeb appeared to care.

But Sabine… her reaction had surprised him more than any other. Shock and disbelief had quickly given way to an overriding sense of sadness. She hid it well around the others, squashed it down so deep that Ezra couldn’t have even sensed it even if he went looking -- not that he did go looking -- but when she was alone, it was as though she reached a point where she couldn’t hold it back.

Apparently, it wasn’t going to go away. He couldn’t be sure how long it had been going on as he had slept, but he knew grief, and he knew that it didn’t disappear quickly. It might fade before it returned, but in the middle of the night, wide awake and with nothing to distract from the unwelcome thoughts spinning around your head, the only thing that stood a chance of stopping it was sleep, and even that wasn’t guaranteed.

Finally giving up on sleep, for the time being anyway, Ezra sat up in bed, spine rounded as he leaned forward, pressing his chest against his knees and his hands to his ears. Covering his ears wouldn’t work, she wasn’t actually crying, and even if she had been, he wouldn’t have been able to hear her. Still, it felt like the right action somehow. Besides, it blocked out the sound of Zeb’s gentle snoring below him.

He hated this.

He hated that he had done this, but more than hating her feeling that level of pain, he hated that she was _allowed_ to feel that. He couldn’t have that; he couldn’t allow himself to slip that far into much misery, because he knew that if he did, he might never be able to claw his way back again. Sabine could allow herself that luxury, because she wasn’t the one going to have to live with it.

He felt a spike of anger at that, and just for a moment, it felt good. It felt good to feel something that wasn’t another person’s sadness.

He pushed it aside, much more easily than he could Sabine’s emotions, and concentrated again on strengthening his shield. That was a completely different skill to blocking his own emotions from others around him. That ability had come relatively easily; though it was sometimes difficult to maintain the block, he had no problem putting it up. This was different. In a way, it felt like cutting himself off from the Force itself, and that idea scared him, because if he didn’t have the Force, he would have nothing.

He pressed his hands harder against his ears and tried again to block her out. Again, he failed.

He didn’t _need_ this. He felt bad enough himself without having to deal with other people’s unhappiness. It wasn’t _fair_.

Carefully, taking care to keep his breathing shallow and quiet, so as not to wake Zeb, Ezra moved to the edge of the bed. He climbed, rather than leapt, down to the ground and tip-toed across the floor of the well-lit room. Behind him, Zeb didn’t even stir, completely oblivious to what was happening across the hall.

The door opened with its usual sound, and Zeb moved just a little, but didn’t wake. As it closed behind him, Ezra relaxed, but only very slightly. He sagged against the wall, eyes fixed on Sabine’s closed door. There were no distractions for her in the middle of the night, but perhaps he could be one. If he could talk to her, maybe he could convince her that it was okay. It wasn’t okay, but maybe he could convince her anyway.

Or if not ‘okay’, that it wasn’t as bad as she thought. After all, it wasn’t like _she_ was the one going blind. He wasn’t going to say that. Even though it should, he didn’t think it would help.

It was probably -- definitely -- for the best that it wasn’t Sabine. The thought of not being able to see Sabine’s art again hurt, but he couldn’t imagine what that would do to her, to lose something like that, the ability to create in that way. That probably explained some of her reaction, actually, now he thought about it.

Well, there was something for him to be grateful for; at least he wasn’t an artist. At least he would be spared the pain of that particular loss.

He bunched his hand into a fist, ready to knock on her door. He took a step closer, and sucked in a deep breath. There was silence on the other side of the door, but the onslaught of grief did not relent.

It felt like an intrusion, somehow. She was hiding this from him, not showing it around him, or the others. It didn’t feel fair to let her know that she had failed. 

He touched his knuckles briefly to the metal of the door, then pulled them back, turned and walked away; no particular destination in mind, he just needed a distraction of his own.


End file.
